Market Opportunity

Computer-driven interactive virtual
humans are increasingly being recognized as useful tools for therapy, training
and education. One
of the main properties of virtual humans is the ability to support a natural
language interaction with the user, understand human speech and react
appropriately. Additionally,
the design
of a virtual human needs to be tailored to the task the character has to perform. As demand for virtual
training environments increases, the need to construct the virtual humans
quickly and efficiently grows as well.

USC Solution

USC researchers have developed NPCEditor, a system for building and
developing virtual characters capable of engaging a user in spoken dialog. The
algorithm is designed for language understanding and is extremely robust to
errors in the input.